Drum & bass is fast drums with a slow groove. 170bpm, but the snare only hits once a bar. You’ll build a DnB breakbeat from scratch: kick, snare, hats. One piece at a time, then stack them.
Repertoire: Brinstar (Hirokazu Tanaka, Metroid, 1986) and Dr. Wily Stage 1 (Takashi Tateishi, Mega Man 2, 1988). Two NES composers who made rhythm feel alive on hardware that barely had drums.
Parallel composition: Adding a slow pulse underneath the koto pattern from L0. The your ambient score grows.
What you already know: s(), note(), stack(), mini-notation ([] * ~ () <>), method chaining (.lpf(), .gain(), .decay(), .sustain()), and the sawtooth synth. All from EDM.0.
A section of a song where the band drops out and the drummer plays alone. In the 60s and 70s, DJs would loop these sections on two turntables, extending a 4-second solo into a 4-minute groove. That loop is “the break.”
DnB, jungle, hip-hop all grew out of looping breaks. Take a drummer’s solo, make it the whole song.
~1989–92: UK acid house and rave scene. Fast tempos, breakbeats layered over 4-on-the-floor kicks. Warehouse parties. Illegal raves. Police helicopters.
~1992–95: Jungle. Producers sped up funk and soul breaks to 150–170bpm and layered reggae and dancehall influence underneath. The Amen break was everywhere. Darkcore emerged as a harder subgenre. Names to know: Goldie, LTJ Bukem, Shy FX, Andy C.
~1995–97: The name changes. Rowdy crowds at jungle nights caused venue trouble. Promoters got shut down. Producers wanted to distance from the reputation, so they started calling the music “drum and bass” instead.
~1997: The real shift: new production tools. Producers stopped looping sampled breaks and started programming individual drum hits from scratch. Same thing happened to hip-hop around the same time (compare NWA’s sampled breaks to Dr. Dre’s The Chronic with its programmed drums). The sound stripped down: fewer elements, louder. At the drop, most tunes were nothing but drums and bass. The name wrote itself.
~2000: Tempo wars. Clubs running at 185bpm+. Dieselboy modded his turntables to break the +8 pitch limit. Secret gatherings of DnB royalty to agree on keeping the genre from becoming speedcore.
~2003+: The era cycle begins. Every few years the sound reinvents: NZ/Aussie wave (Pendulum, Concord Dawn), Noisia/Spor/Phace era, halftime, and the current 4/4 trend. The genre likes to try new things.
Now: 30+ years and international. The jungle-vs-DnB naming debate is settled by time; jungle was about 5 years. DnB has been 30.
New production tools meant fewer elements per tune. Fewer elements = more headroom = louder. Producers competed to make the loudest dubplates. At the drop, almost every track reduced to two things: drums, and bass. The name described what was left.
The Amen break (a 6-second drum solo from 1969 by The Winstons) is the backbone of jungle and early DnB. Nearly every breakbeat in the genre traces back to it. Chopped, timestretched, pitched, layered. That one solo became the most sampled loop in music history.
History adapted from u/GardenerInAWar on r/DnB and Wikipedia’s History of Drum and Bass.
Every sound in every NES game came from 5 channels:
| channel | type | what it does |
|---|---|---|
| Pulse 1 | square wave | melody, lead, harmony. Variable duty cycle changes the timbre. |
| Pulse 2 | square wave | same as Pulse 1. Two melody voices total. That’s your polyphony budget. |
| Triangle | triangle wave | bass and soft leads. No volume control. It’s either on or off. |
| Noise | pseudo-random noise | percussion, sound effects, atmosphere. Short bursts = hi-hats. Long bursts = snares. |
| DPCM | 1-bit sample | low-quality sampled audio. Used sparingly for kicks and vocal shouts. |
Koji Kondo (Mario, Zelda) used the noise channel as percussion. Clear beats. The triangle carries the bass. His music sounds like a band playing.
Hirokazu Tanaka (Metroid) used the noise channel as atmosphere. Long noise sweeps, environmental texture. His music sounds like a place.
Same 5 channels. Kondo made you want to move. Tanaka made you afraid to.
| system | year | channels | what changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| NES | 1983 | 5 | the constraint era. Everything composed within 5 voices. |
| SNES | 1990 | 8 (sampled) | the Sony SPC700 chip. Real instrument samples. |
| PS1 | 1994 | 24 (CD audio) | the constraint disappears. Game music becomes indistinguishable from film scores. |
| Modern | 2000+ | unlimited | full orchestras, live recording. The constraint is budget, not hardware. |
The NES era produced some of the most inventive composition in gaming history because there was nowhere to hide.
Five sounds. That’s all you need. Play each one:
Kick (bd): The big low one. Boom. Floor of the beat.
Snare (sd): The crack. Sharp, mid-range.
Hi-hat closed (hh): Tick tick tick. Metallic, short.
Hi-hat open (oh): Tssss. Same cymbal, held open. Longer.
Clap (cp): Like a snare but more air.
All five in sequence:
A bar is a container for beats. Most music uses 4 beats per bar. In strudel, one cycle = one bar.
You divide the bar into slots. 4 slots = quarter notes. 8 slots = eighth notes. 16 slots = sixteenth notes. More slots, more resolution.
~ is a rest. Nothing plays on that slot. So s("bd ~ sd ~") is 4 slots:
kick on 1, rest, snare on 3, rest.
Same kick and snare, but now in 8 slots. More room to put things between them:
Play both. They sound the same. The 8-slot version just has empty spaces you can fill later.
Four-on-the-floor: Kick on every beat. House, techno, disco.
Four-on-the-floor means a kick drum on every beat. It’s the foundation of disco, house, techno, and trance. The name comes from the drummer’s foot pedal; the foot hits the floor on every beat.
The pattern was popularized in 1970s disco. Before that, kick patterns were syncopated, placed off the beat for swing and groove. Disco straightened the kick out and made it predictable. That predictability makes it work for dancing. You always know where the next thump is.
The same pattern shows up in other contexts with different names. In jazz, it’s called “feathering”: the bass drum played so lightly you feel it more than hear it. In reggae, it’s called a “steppers” rhythm.
DnB broke away from this deliberately. Early rave music was 4-on-the-floor, but jungle producers emphasized breakbeats instead: chopped-up funk breaks with syncopated kick patterns. The kick on every beat was abandoned on purpose. That’s why DnB sounds different from house or techno. The kick is unpredictable. The spaces between kicks create tension.
The irony: current DnB producers (Mandidextrous and others) are bringing 4/4 kicks back as a stylistic choice, completing a 30-year circle.
Based on Wikipedia’s article on four-on-the-floor rhythm.
Backbeat: Snare on beats 2 and 4. Rock, pop, hip-hop.
Half-time: Snare on beat 3 only. DnB, trap.
Play all three. Notice that four-on-the-floor is steady, backbeat has more bounce, and half-time feels loose and heavy.
A break is a looped drum pattern. The kit is the set of sounds. A bar is 4 beats. Slots subdivide the bar. That’s enough to build a DnB break.
Play these two. Same pattern, different speed:
The second one is faster. That’s 170 beats per minute, DnB tempo.
Change 42.5 to 32. That’s 128bpm, house tempo. Try 45: that’s 180, fast DnB.
The number controls the speed.
The number is cycles per minute: how many times the pattern repeats in 60 seconds. One cycle = one bar = 4 beats. So 170bpm ÷ 4 = 42.5 cpm. That’s the conversion.
setcpm(42.5) is the number you’ll use for every editor in this lesson.
BPM = beats per minute. CPM = cycles per minute. Strudel thinks in cycles, not beats. One cycle is one full pass through your pattern. If your pattern has 4 slots, one cycle = one bar of 4/4 time.
CPM = BPM / beats_per_cycle
| genre | bpm | cpm | code |
|---|---|---|---|
| hip-hop | 90 | 22.5 | setcpm(22.5) |
| house | 128 | 32 | setcpm(32) |
| techno | 140 | 35 | setcpm(35) |
| drum & bass | 170 | 42.5 | setcpm(42.5) |
| fast DnB | 180 | 45 | setcpm(45) |
Convention. Most electronic music is in 4/4 time: four beats per bar. Strudel defaults to dividing one cycle into however many elements you give it. If you write four sounds, each gets one beat. That maps cleanly to a bar of 4/4. You can write patterns with 3, 5, 7 elements; the cycle just divides differently.
setcpm(BPM / 4): divide your target BPM by 4 to get cycles per minute.
170bpm = setcpm(42.5). 128bpm = setcpm(32). That’s it.
DnB kick placement is sparse. Beat 1, always. Then a ghost kick near the end of the bar pulls you into the next one.
Kick on beat 1, nothing else. Eight slots gives 16th-note resolution:
Add a quiet kick on the “and” of beat 4. It pulls you forward into the next bar:
That second kick sits inside brackets ([~ bd]) so it lands on the back half
of that slot. It’s not on a main beat. It’s between beats. That off-grid placement makes it a ghost.
Move the ghost. Try s("bd ~ ~ ~ ~ [~ bd] ~ ~"). Or put it earlier:
s("bd ~ ~ ~ [~ bd] ~ ~ ~"). Different placement, different pull.
Hirokazu Tanaka had the same tools you just used. NES noise channel for hi-hats, the triangle for bass. Listen to how he placed the kick in Brinstar. Sparse. Atmospheric. The bass note rhythm does most of the work:
One kick per bar. The bass carries the pulse. Tanaka didn’t need more. Compare this to the DnB kick pattern you just built. Same idea: kick on the downbeat, space everywhere else. The bass fills in what the kick leaves out.
The snare is what makes DnB sound like DnB. Beat 3. Not 2 and 4 like house or hip-hop. Just 3.
The snare alone, one hit per bar:
Compare. House-style backbeat: snare on 2 and 4. DnB: snare on 3 only:
Notice that the house pattern bobs. The DnB pattern swings.
Half-time means the snare hits half as often as you’d expect. At 170bpm, the snare lands every other beat (beat 3 out of 4), so the groove feels like 85bpm. Fast tempo, slow groove. That’s the DnB pocket.
In 1969, Gregory Coleman played a 6-second drum solo on “Amen, Brother” by The Winstons. A B-side filler track. Nobody bought it for the drums.
Then in the late ’80s, producers in London started sampling that 6-second break. Sped it up. Chopped it. Layered it. It became the backbone of jungle, then drum & bass, then half of electronic music. One loop. Thousands of tracks.
Coleman’s pattern has the half-time snare, ghost kicks, and a loose swing that synth drums can’t replicate. The imperfections (the slightly early hi-hat, the snare that rings a little long) are the whole point. Machines are tight. The amen breathes.
This isn’t the real amen (that’s a sample, not a pattern), but it’s close enough to hear the shape:
Coleman died homeless in 2006. He never received royalties for the most-sampled drum break in history. The Winstons didn’t copyright the break separately from the song. By the time anyone thought to, it was public domain through sheer ubiquity. Richard L. Spencer (the band’s singer) set up a GoFundMe for Gregory Coleman’s family. It raised a few thousand dollars. The break has generated billions in music sales.
Takashi Tateishi composed Dr. Wily Stage 1 in C♯ minor at 180bpm. That’s fast. DnB territory. The snare pattern is half-time. The bass drives through root and fifth. The groove is inseparable from the melody:
180bpm. Half-time snare on beat 3. The bass IS the rhythm. Tateishi made the triangle channel do the work of both a bass guitar and a drummer. On 5 channels. In 1988.
Play the Brinstar approximation from earlier (scroll up), then play this one. Same hardware, same era. Tanaka made atmosphere. Tateishi made adrenaline. The difference is in the note density and tempo, not the tools.
Hi-hats fill the space between kick and snare. At 170bpm, 16th-note hats are fast. That’s the point.
Sixteen hi-hats per cycle, all the same volume:
Flat. Mechanical. Sounds like a typewriter, not a drummer.
Real drummers don’t hit every hat the same. .gain() with a pattern string sets per-step volume:
The gain pattern repeats across the 16 steps. Quiet–medium–quiet–loud. Notice that the accents on every 4th hit create a pulse inside the hi-hat line.
An open hat (oh) rings longer. Drop one at the end of the bar for a lift:
Try a softer gain pattern: .gain(".3 .5 .3 .8"). Or drop to 8th notes:
s("hh*8"). Halving the hat density changes the feel completely.
You just built a dense groove. 16th-note hats, kick, snare, open hat. Now the opposite question: what happens when you take almost everything away?
A taiko ensemble might use 3 drums. The player who hits less isn’t playing less. Listen:
Slower. Three hits per bar. The rests carry as much weight as the strikes. Now add the koto on top:
Compare this to the 170bpm DnB break you just built. Same tools: s(), .gain(), stack(). The difference is density and tempo. The dense groove fills every slot. This one leaves most of them empty.
DnB: dense. most slots filled.
taiko: sparse. the space IS the rhythm.
Both patterns are rhythm. One fills every slot. The other leaves most of them empty. The DnB break drives you forward. The taiko pattern makes you wait. Both work because the composer chose where NOT to put a hit.
Ma (間) is a Japanese concept of negative space. It appears in architecture (the empty room is the room), calligraphy (the space between strokes defines the character), theater (the pause in Noh drama holds more tension than the action), and garden design (the rocks are placed to shape the emptiness between them).
the space between strokes defines the character
A shakuhachi player breathes audibly between phrases. The breath is part of the piece. A taiko player who leaves a beat empty isn’t resting. They’re shaping the air around the next hit.
Claude Debussy attended the 1889 Paris Exposition and heard a Javanese gamelan ensemble. He came back and started writing music full of space, unresolved harmonics, and suspended time. Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune (1894) sounds nothing like the German Romantic tradition he was trained in. It sounds like someone who learned that silence has shape.
The ~ rest is your ma. It’s not a gap. It’s structure. When you write s("bd ~ ~ bd ~ ~ bd ~"), those tildes aren’t empty. They’re carrying the rhythm.
Taiko drumming is at least 2000 years old. The earliest references are Shinto and Buddhist: temple drums marking time, calling communities, driving away evil spirits. The wadaiko (Japanese drum) is a ritual object before it’s a musical instrument. The physical stance matters. The breathing, the way you hold the bachi (sticks). Taiko is martial as much as musical.
In 1951, Daihachi Oguchi, a jazz drummer from Nagano, arranged traditional taiko patterns for a group ensemble. Before Oguchi, taiko was typically solo in ceremonial contexts. He invented kumi-daiko: the ensemble form. A jazz drummer reinvented a 2000-year-old tradition.
Taiko teaches something grid-based electronic music forgets: a drum hit has weight based on the body behind it. When you program .gain(".9 0 0 .6 0 0 1 0"), you’re approximating what a taiko player does with their arms. The dynamic pattern IS the rhythm.
Add a pulse underneath your koto sketch from L0. No delay. No reverb. Just s(), .gain(), and setcpm(). The tools you know:
Two layers. The koto floats. The pulse sits underneath like a heartbeat. No effects yet. Those come in L4.
All four pieces stacked. Play it. Listen for each layer: kick on 1, snare on 3, hats running, open hat at the end of the bar.
s("sd(3,16)").gain(.3). Stack it in alongside the main snare.s("bd ~ [~ bd] ~ ~ ~ [~ bd] ~"). Two ghosts instead of one.s("ride*16") or s("cymbal*8"). Different metal, different character.The koto from your ambient sketch, layered on top of the DnB break. The dense groove underneath, the sparse melody floating above it. Listen to what happens when two different rhythmic philosophies play at the same time:
The break stops. The koto continues alone. The lesson ends quiet:
Play both. Decide which ending is yours. The dense one teaches you that koto can live inside a groove. The quiet one teaches you that the groove was always optional.
| tool | does | looks like |
|---|---|---|
| bd | kick drum sample | s("bd") |
| sd | snare drum sample | s("sd") |
| hh | closed hi-hat sample | s("hh") |
| oh | open hi-hat sample | s("oh") |
| cp | clap sample | s("cp") |
| bar | one cycle = 4 beats | one repetition of the pattern |
| setcpm() | sets the tempo in cycles per minute | setcpm(42.5) |
| .gain("pattern") | per-step volume with a pattern string | .gain(".4 .7 .4 .9") |
170bpm = setcpm(42.5). 128bpm = setcpm(32).
The formula: BPM / beats-per-cycle = CPM. Beats per cycle is almost always 4.
Next: The Bass. Sub bass, reese, and why two detuned saws make that sound.
Tracks that demonstrate this lesson’s concepts.
| artist | track | why |
|---|---|---|
| Hirokazu Tanaka | Metroid: Brinstar (1986) | (VGM) inspired by the Brinstar atmosphere, rhythm from noise channels |
| Takashi Tateishi | Mega Man 2: Dr. Wily Stage 1 (1988) | (VGM) inspired by the bass-driven energy, the NES as a drum machine |
| The Winstons | Amen, Brother (1969) | (breakbeat) the 7-second break that built jungle and DnB |
| Shy FX & UK Apache | Original Nuttah (1994) | (jungle) chopped amen + dancehall, crossover jungle |
| Roni Size / Reprazent | Brown Paper Bag (1997) | (DnB) live bass over programmed breaks |
| Origin Unknown | Valley of the Shadows (1993) | (jungle) processed breaks, early jungle landmark |
| Goldie | Inner City Life (1995) | (DnB) orchestral strings + chopped breaks, defining the “intelligent jungle” sound |
| LTJ Bukem | Demon’s Theme (1992) | (DnB) atmospheric pads + frenetic breakbeats, genesis of liquid DnB |
| DJ Hype | Shot in the Dark (1996) | (jungle) amen break chopped to perfection, pure jungle energy |
| Andy C | Valley of the Shadows (Remix) (1997) | (DnB) the DJ who pushed DnB tempo and mixing to its limit |
Every genre that uses breakbeats traces back to a handful of drum solos, isolated and looped.
Gregory Coleman played a 7-second drum solo on “Amen, Brother,” the B-side of The Winstons’ single. The record flopped. In the late 1980s, UK DJs found it in the Ultimate Breaks and Beats compilation series (compiled by Lenny Roberts, 1986–1991) and started looping and chopping it. Coleman died homeless in 2006. He never received a cent in royalties. The Winstons’ frontman Richard Spencer has spoken publicly about the ethical failure. In 2015, Richard L. Spencer set up a GoFundMe for Gregory Coleman’s family. It raised a few thousand dollars. The break itself appears on an estimated 3,000+ tracks.
London pirate radio stations (Kool FM, Rinse FM) played sped-up hip-hop breakbeats over reggae basslines. Producers like Goldie, LTJ Bukem, and Shy FX chopped breaks on Akai samplers (S950, S1000). The tempo pushed from 130 to 160 to 170+ BPM. By 1994, “jungle” had its own identity — raw, chopped breaks over deep sub-bass.
The genre split: “intelligent” DnB (LTJ Bukem, Photek) emphasized atmosphere. “Techstep” (Ed Rush & Optical, Bad Company) pushed darkness. Both kept the half-time snare on beat 3 and the breakbeat foundation. Roni Size’s New Forms won the Mercury Prize in 1997, bringing DnB to mainstream attention.
Sources: The Winstons, “Amen, Brother” • Harrison, N. “Can I Get An Amen?” (2004) • Ultimate Breaks and Beats Collection, Cornell University Library • BBC, “The Most Sampled Loop in Music History” (2015) • Engadget, “Amen Break Crowdfunding” (2015) • Reynolds, S. Energy Flash (1998) • Belle-Fortune, B. All Crews (2004) • Akai S900/S950 Tutorial